Thick as Thieves (33 page)

“He was when I left him this afternoon. You were good with him.”

Bobby shrugs. “Babysitting gave me something to do. He was jumpy without you.”

Carr rubs his grit-filled eyes. “Nice to feel wanted.”

Bobby looks at him, laughs ruefully, and shakes his head. “Fuckin’ Carr,” he mutters.

Mike is sitting on the front steps, drinking from the bottle, blowing smoke, looking at the sky. Carr walks around him.

“Guess you’ve given up tryin’ to be like Deke,” Mike says. “No pregame party tonight, right? So I got to make my own.”

“Make it a small one. It’s an early day tomorrow.”

“I’ll try to fit you in—unless something else comes up. Maybe I got to get my teeth cleaned or something.”

“Give it a rest, Mike. I was gone for, what, a few hours?”

“It was more than a day.”

“And now I’m back, so spare me.”

Mike is fast—up and at Carr almost before the whiskey bottle hits the dirt. One hand goes to Carr’s neck, his thumb in the hollow of Carr’s throat. The other hand holds a knife. “If I didn’t need you whole,
pendejo
, you wouldn’t be,” he says. “
¿Está claro?
”

“Very clear,” Carr says quietly. “You feel better now that you got that off your chest?”

Bobby calls from the steps. “It’s nice you boys are so glad to see each other.”

“Piss off,
cabrón
,” Mike says, but there’s not much to it. He doesn’t resist when Bobby hooks his arm and hauls him away.

“You know the world is fucked when I’m the voice of reason,” Bobby says, turning Mike toward the house, “but maybe we should all just keep our minds on the job and save the rest of the bullshit for later.”

It was, Carr thinks, driving back to his hotel, the same advice Mr. Boyce had given him in Boston.

Tina had stayed at the gate while Carr followed Boyce into the first-class lounge. It was empty, the attendants conveniently on a break. Carr was too tired to speculate on the coincidence. Even off the golf course Boyce was dressed in black, and he seemed much larger.

“Family,” Boyce said, as he settled into an armchair. “What are you going to do with them?” Carr had no answer, and Mr. Boyce shook his head. “But that’s no excuse. Pros don’t make excuses. You have problems, I have problems—everyone has problems. But so what? You do your job, and
then
you deal with your problems. Get it the other way around, and you’re no good to anyone. You want to look after your father, you’ll keep your goddamn head in the game.”

Boyce’s words and rumbling voice had filled the room, and Carr had nodded in the right places. He kept nodding later, back at the gate, where Tina had reported in a low voice that Kathy Rink had called her man in Singapore.

“She was on the line for nearly an hour, listening to him talk about Greg Frye. Our guy thinks she went away satisfied.”

Carr nodded. Tina had looked at him and hadn’t liked what she’d seen. Before she left, she’d gripped him hard by the arm. “You better get a coffee or a searchlight or something, and get your head out of whatever fog bank it’s in. You go sleepwalking into Prager’s place, you won’t walk out again.”

Even now he can feel her fingers on his wrist.

Carr pulls through the gates of his hotel, and into a parking space. He shuts off the engine and sits in the dark and silence.

You want to look after your father
? Look after him—it turned out he didn’t even know him, didn’t know either of them, and never had.
All that watching and you never saw anything
. What was it he had seen for all those years? What he’d wanted to see? What he’d needed to see?

Carr had driven back to Stockbridge on autopilot, and Arthur Carr had dozed the whole way. Carr helped him up the porch steps; he weighed
no more than a handful of straw. His father stretched his legs on the sofa as soon as they got inside and closed his eyes, and Carr had walked around the room. Though maybe
walked
wasn’t quite right.
Wandered
might be closer;
staggered
closer still.

The vertigo that had come on in the diner, along with the news about his mother, was back again, and as he moved about the living room he had to reach for things—a doorknob, a windowsill, the dusty furniture—to keep from falling or floating away. Eventually he fetched up beside the piano.

The photographs were still there, in their tarnished frames, and Carr stared at them while his head swam and his father snored gently. His father at the lake; his father in cap and gown; his mother in a garden, or at a party, or at a dance. He’d spent his life looking at these pictures, and now it was as if he’d never seen them before. The people behind the dirty glass were strangers to him, and what he thought he’d known about them was less than smoke.

Carr switched on a lamp and gazed at the photo of his father at the lake, and suddenly the small, pale face seemed to wear not a smirk, but a shy grin. And in the commencement picture, Arthur Carr’s smile didn’t look bitter—it looked nervous, but excited and even hopeful. Carr shook his head and picked up the photo of his mother.

The dark hair, blurred by movement, the luminous skin, the graceful neck and white teeth, the finger of smoke between lips that were just beginning to smile, or to speak to someone out of frame—he knew the pieces, but he couldn’t make them whole. Carr closed his eyes and tried in vain to retrieve another image of her, to hear the sound of her voice again, and the words she’d whispered as they peered from the windows, to feel her hand around his again. He breathed in deeply, straining to catch a trace of gardenias and tobacco, but found only the musty smells of his father’s house and of the humid night. An ache burrowed deep in his chest—deeper than bone—a wound where something had been excised badly, and with a dull blade. It was like losing her again. It was worse. His throat closed up and his eyes burned.

He looked up to see his father, watching him from the sofa.

“What are you doing?” Arthur Carr asked.

“Looking at pictures,” Carr whispered.

“What pictures?” Carr held up the photo in its frame. His father squinted at it. “I didn’t know that was up there.”

Carr rubbed his eyes. “Where’s it from?”

His father shrugged. “That picture? Someone’s wedding, I think. I don’t remember whose. It was before you were born.”

Carr cleared his throat. “You saved her. You said that you saved her from … from a full-blown investigation.”

“That’s what I said.”

“But you didn’t say why—why you did it. After everything she did—all those years—why did you protect her?”

Arthur Carr shook his head. “Why did I … She was my
wife
, for chrissakes—your
mother
. What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t going to let them …” He shook his head some more, and then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I told you—don’t be thick.”

Sitting in the hotel parking lot, Carr reaches for his wallet. The photographs are inside, creased and antique-looking alongside Gregory Frye’s fabricated identifications. His father by the lake and at commencement, his mother at some forgotten wedding. They are part of a narrative—the story of his parents, his father the embittered bully, his mother the brave, long-suffering victim—that is undone now: unraveled and debunked, like Santa or the Tooth Fairy, but even more ridiculous. Carr lays the pictures on the dashboard, smooths them out, and looks at them for a while. Then he folds them up again and tucks them away with the rest of his false papers.

Despite the sun and the honeyed breeze, Carr’s fingers are cold and white. His elbows are stiff and his legs heavy, and when he moves them they feel clumsy. His chest is too small for his lungs, and too brittle for his hammering heart. It’s fear, he knows, and adrenaline. He takes a slow breath in and lets it slowly out again, then shifts the champagne flute to his other hand. He flexes his fingers until the blood comes back, and he watches Curtis Prager grab a waiter by the arm.

Prager points at the carpaccio on the silver platter. “That’s wagyu beef,” Prager tells a banker from Panama City, “and what those bastards in Miami charge for it makes me think we’re in the wrong business. Clearly, the real margins are in cows.” The Panama City banker laughs as if it’s funny, and so does everyone else within earshot, and Prager moves on through his guests. Carr hangs back, pretends to sip his champagne, and looks at the crowd.

It’s an off-season party—not as large, Carr knows, as some of Isla Privada’s charity events, but still a good-size turnout of local dignitaries, favor-seekers, would-be business associates, and other sycophants. It’s a handsome crowd too, expensively dressed in regatta casual: the men in variations of Prager’s outfit—white ducks, linen blazer, and deck shoes—the women in gossamer, bare arms, and sandals with intricate straps. Like birds, Carr thinks, all plumage and bright chirping. All appetite too. They
flock around the white-jacketed waiters as they emerge from the caterer’s base camp in the guesthouse, swooping on trays of sushi, sashimi, oysters, and high-margin carpaccio.

Except for its lawns and patios and first-floor bathrooms, the main house isn’t open to unescorted guests, so the crowd has flowed mostly to the beach. Carr is at the east end of the beach, near the boathouse pier, leaning against the red Zodiac that has been pulled up on the sand. He watches as his host makes his way slowly, convivially, westward. Handshake, peck, nod, chuckle. Shoulder squeeze, smile, nod, move on. There’s a quartet set up on the guesthouse patio. They’re laboring over a samba, and it seems to Carr that Prager has matched his movements to their rhythms. Peck, nod, chuckle.

Kathy Rink prowls in Prager’s wake, like a pilot fish in an orange muumuu. Her eyes scan restlessly over guests and staff, her head pivots left and right, and her cell phone is constantly at her ear. Carr can understand Kathy Rink’s nerves: this is the first of Prager’s periodic soirees to take place on her watch. She wants it to be a smooth afternoon, as seamless and unblemished as the breezy blue sky. Carr allows himself a tiny smile and hopes it will be the worst day of her life.

He takes another pretend sip and scans the crowd for Howard Bessemer. He spots him at a bar set up in the shade of a palm. His jacket is hung over his arm, and he’s laughing at something a heavyset redhead has said. Given the sweating and fretting of the morning, Carr thinks he looks improbably relaxed.

“I don’t feel like going to a party,” Bessemer had whined from beneath his blankets. “I feel clammy. I think I’m coming down with something.”

“That’s a hangover, Howie,” Carr called to him. “Have some coffee, and it’ll go away.”

“I don’t see why I have to go anyway. What do you expect me to do there?”

“I expect you to eat and drink, and when I tell you, to ask Prager to do that favor.”

“But I don’t feel—”

“You do it, Howie, and we’re headed home tonight.”

Bessemer leans against the bar and laughs some more. Carr shakes his head and checks his watch. He checks the empty ocean north, and the jagged peninsula to the west. He can’t see them, but he knows Bobby and
Mike are out there now, beyond the rocks. They’ll call when they’re ready, and then they’ll wait for his say-so. He checks his watch again. Time to lift the latch.

Champagne flute in hand, Carr crosses the beach and climbs one of the stone stairways. He cuts across the croquet lawn toward a fieldstone patio and the main house. His heart pounds harder as he walks, and his legs are reluctant. He passes two women headed for the beach. They smile at him and giggle as they teeter by. The taller one reminds him of Valerie, though she’s not as arresting, and for a moment he wonders where Valerie is and what she’s doing and if he’ll see her tonight. He touches his ear, but there’s no earpiece there, no whispering voice, no breath that he can almost feel. Then his mind comes back as he approaches a pair of glass doors. Laughter, music, the chatter of the crowd, all fade behind him. He takes a deep breath and doesn’t look at the camera mounted above. He pulls at a handle and hears Declan’s brogue in his head.
Nothin’ like a house in the dark, lad
. Nothing like one in broad daylight, either, and filled with security guards.

The hall is quiet and the air-conditioning sends a shiver down Carr’s arms. His footsteps echo on the polished stone floor. He has spent hours squinting at the floor plans of this house, and on them he’s found three places he might enter when the time comes. Today, after walking the grounds, counting and recounting the guards, watching the flow of guests and staff, and visiting several bathrooms, he has narrowed his list to one.

Down the hall, on the right, is a powder room. It’s small and windowless, and Carr has already been there once today. Just past the powder room, around a corner to the left, is a stairwell, with stairs climbing up. Past the stairs, across the hall, and three paces down is Carr’s way in.

It’s a rectangle labeled
LAUNDRY-2
on the floor plans, but it’s not the room’s function that interests Carr, it’s the small window set in its wall. It’s in a casement-style frame, and because of its size and ground-floor location, and the dense hibiscus growing just outside, it has no view to speak of. What it does have, by Carr’s careful calculation, is a position outside the view of any of Prager’s security cameras.

As on Carr’s prior visit, one of Rink’s security crew cuts appears at the end of the corridor, to make sure he doesn’t wander too far afield. Carr raises his champagne glass.

“Toilet?” he asks the guard.

“Of course, sir,” the guard says. “Right here.” He points toward the powder room. Carr steps in and locks the door. He lifts the toilet lid and pours his champagne down in a thin, noisy stream. Then he sets his glass on the edge of the sink and starts unrolling toilet paper.

“A little help,” Carr calls, as he steps out of the bathroom.

The security guard comes down the stairs and around the corner, and almost slips on water that’s begun to flow across the powder room’s threshold. “Oh Christ,” the guard says.

Carr smiles sheepishly. “I think it’s clogged,” and he points his glass at the toilet and the water and bits of toilet paper flowing from the top of the bowl.